Dylan Golden Aycock is generally identified as a guitarist, and with good reason. He’s an Imaginational Anthem alumnus, and while having a tune on that series of compilations is good for one’s guitar cred, he knows how to spank a plank and make some strings sing for real. Cue up “No Spring Chicken,” which opens No New Summers, and you get the picture. It opens with a rustic, slightly discordant flourish, then plunges into a hurtling fingerpicking pattern that’ll grab you by the lapels and take you on a trip to points unknown. But as the track progresses, other sounds creep in. A double bass pulses, another one seethes under a bow, and harder-to-source sonorities give certain passages a hallucinatory aura. If it’s autobiographical (and it is), Aycock may no longer be a fluffy little chick, but nothing’s slowing him down or tripping him up.
By the time you get to the second track, “Buoyant,” No New Summers already refuses to fit the pigeonhole. Made from layers of field recordings and bass, it abandons string patterns in favor of a slow-turning maelstrom of sound, simultaneously drifting and dreadful. Third song “Good Directions” is likewise rich in sound and atmosphere, and heavy with nostalgia. Here’s where the truths kick in: Aycock’s not really a solo guitarist, but a composer and multi-instrumentalist who happens to be a fine picker. He’s a master at lining up atmospheres so that they imply a story that can’t be pinned down, but can certainly be felt.
Flip No New Summers over, and the sounds keep painting new scenes. Sighing pedal steel and gamboling 12-string impart a wistfulness for old excitements, a slow quicksand of lamenting mellotrons capture the feeling of being out late but knowing you can’t get lost, and the title track’s delay-sodden guitars fade like a slow sunset.
The album cover’s image of cowboy-boot-shod feet leaning into a skateboard stance give it away; Aycock’s simultaneously mourning and celebrating the lost abandon he felt during childhood summer times. If you want to know how it felt to grow up in a place and time when no one called the cops if the kids ran loose and gleefully grubby after the streetlights came on, give No New Summers a listen. [Worried Songs/Feeding Tube]
—Bill Meyer
